A Secret Contest So Secret Nobody's Won

P&G Deodorant Brand Is Practically Begging You to Be a Winner

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Procter & Gamble Co.'s Secret deodorant has a promotion so secret that even after more than eight months nobody has won one of the 10 $15,000 diamonds being given away.

So with the June 30 deadline fast approaching, the Secret brand team appears in a YouTube video posted May 18 from digital shop IMC2, Dallas, calling attention to the lack of winners. As of two days later, that video still had only 281 views. So it's remained fairly secret too.

Actually, the promotion hasn't been that undercover. Quantcast and TNS Compete estimate the website, secretdiamondgiveaway.com, has gotten an average of 20,000 to 30,000 unique visitors monthly since last September.

Certainly the idea, putting diamonds in sticks of Secret Flawless deodorant, seems enticing enough. It's vaguely reminiscent of a famous P&G promotion from 1982 that put one diamond and 1,000 cubic zirconia in boxes of Spic and Span cleaner. Some retailers wouldn't carry the boxes for fear of theft.

There's no real danger of that this time, as there are no real diamonds in the deodorant, just fake ones. But no one has been using up or cutting through their Secret deodorant yet to find them. You don't even have to do that, because you can just enter the product code on the website to see if you've won, but no winners have emerged that way, either.

Per contest rules, it looks like at least nine diamonds will be given away to mail-in entrants, because no purchase is necessary. So not all is lost.

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Jack Neff

Jack Neff, editor at large, covers household and personal-care marketers, Walmart and market research. He's based near Cincinnati and has previously written for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Bloomberg, and trade publications covering the food, woodworking and graphic design industries and worked in corporate communications for the E.W. Scripps Co.